Alfred D. Chandler Jr., 1918–2007

The business history community mourns the loss of Alfred Chandler, who defined the field as it exists today. Articles in business history rarely fail to cite one or more of Chandler's books or articles. As his good friend and fellow Harvard Business School professor Thomas McCraw observed, "Chandler was not only an academic giant driven by intellectual curiosity, but also a notable gentleman scholar." The fires of research were never banked in Chandler. He not only showed the way in management and business history, but also shaped the work of numerous historians of technology. Steven Usselman's recent retrospective look at Chandler's The Visible Hand (Technology and Culture, July 2006) is one indication of this. My experiences with him offer additional evidence of his influence on the history of technology.

First, however, we should recall his notable books, some of which have been used in history of technology courses for decades. In Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the American Industrial Enterprise (1962), Chandler focused on the executives who devised the decentralized, multidivisional structure of large corporations. His best-known work, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (1977), won the Pulitzer Prize as well as the Bancroft Prize. In it Chandler argued that the visible hand of management had replaced Adam Smith's invisible hand of market forces. Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (1990) compared the evolution of managerial capitalism in the United States, England, and Germany. In 2001 he published Inventing the Electronic Century: The Epic Story of the Consumer Electronics and Computer Industries, and Shaping the Industrial Century: The Remarkable Story of the Evolution of the Modern Chemical and Pharmaceutical Industries followed in 2005.

Chandler's books are daunting for the rest of us. Yet, as McCraw stresses, Chandler was a scholar and a generous gentleman who nurtured colleagues. To this I can testify. While he was teaching at MIT, Chandler invited me to leave Washington and Lee University and accept an associate professorship in history at MIT, which I did in 1963. Shortly thereafter, however, Johns Hopkins University invited him to head the history department there, and Chandler cautioned me that his replacement at MIT had little use for historians of technology. Nevertheless, I moved to MIT and, as Chandler predicted, I did not receive tenure. Then his nurturing instincts took over. He told me that I would never find an appropriate position until I published a book, so he offered me a three-year visiting professorship at Hopkins so that I could write my Sperry biography. As he predicted, when the Sperry volume appeared, several universities offered me "appropriate" positions, and I chose the University of Pennsylvania. My gratitude to "Al" was unbounded.

Figure 1.

Alfred D. Chandler Jr. at his desk. (Courtesy of the Harvard Business School.)

Over the years we kept in contact, and I was asked on several occasions to write critiques of Chandler's work from a historian of technology's viewpoint. I chided Chandler in these essays for his failure to appreciate the role that my favored managers—those in the electric utility industry—played in management history. Chandler simply followed his scholarly instincts, however, and he left me to celebrate the utility guys if I felt so inclined.

I, and many of my colleagues in business history and in the history of technology, will remember Chandler as a scholar's scholar—an exemplar to whom we could all look for inspiration. Fay, a gifted artist and Al's wife, also saw him as a symbol of continuity and commitment. We will miss him sorely.